OSS

Once upon a time in IT, using open source simply meant Linux instead of Windows, or maybe MySQL instead of Oracle.

Now, there is such a huge diversity of open source tools, and almost every leading digital business and tech startup is making extensive use of them. It’s been a remarkable turnaround for open source over the last 10 years, placing the trend firmly at the heart of the digital revolution.

The explosive growth of e-commerce, mobile and social media has completely altered the customer’s lifestyle and buying habits. Today, organizations are expected to engage with customers in Omni-channel environment. They need to create a customer journey. This is the driver of digital transformation.

Please note that while we think of ourselves as an open source company it would be more accurate to call it an open core company since we ship both the open source GitLab Community Edition and the close source GitLab Enterprise Edition. Thanks to paxcoder for pointing this out on Hacker News.

GitLab began as a labor of love from Dmitriy Zaporozhets and Valery Sizov, who built the first version together in 2011. Like many open source authors, they were only able to work on the project part time. Sid Sijbrandij joined forces a year later and created GitLab.com, the first SaaS offering and first experiment with monetization.

Today GitLab is a model for open source sustainability and stewardship. It is being used in over 100,000 organizations including RedHat, NASA, Intel, Uber, and VMWare, to name just a few. Large organizations buy enterprise licenses, sustaining and growing both the company and the free open source project. GitLab now has over 90 employees, including Sid and Dmitriy who serve as CEO and CTO, respectively.

Clearly, open source marketing apps have their place. These days, marketing departments are responsible for a sizable percentage of enterprise application purchases and deployment decisions. In fact, Gartner has predicted that by 2017 chief marketing officers (CMOs) will spend more on IT than chief information officers (CIOs) do.

While the accuracy of that forecast is open to debate, marketing teams are certainly becoming more involved in the selection of software. The marketing automation industry alone is now worth an estimated $1.62 billion per year, and many marketing teams are also involved in choosing content management systems, customer relationship management, ecommerce software and other solutions.

Once upon a time FOSS was about Freedom. It was about exposing equality within source code. It allowed everyone equal rights and equal access to the technology they were using. An idea that if you were capable, you could fix code or pay someone to fix code. An ideology that there was something greater than yourself and that there was an inherent right built into what it is to be human with software.

As an industry, we've spent decades collectively wringing our hands over Evil Vendor Lock-In. And for equally as long, we've happily shoveled hundreds of billions of dollars into these same vendors whose lock-in we allegedly fear: Microsoft, Oracle, and now Amazon. If it weren't for proprietary licensing, cloud hosting, or other evil machinations, we'd live in a paradise of perfect competition and everyday low prices.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration, today announced the agenda for LinuxCon and ContainerCon Europe, taking place October 4-6 in Berlin, Germany. The event will offer unparalleled open source technical content for technologists of all levels and a celebration of the 25th anniversary of Linux.

LimeSurvey is released under the GPL, and a number of companies provide commercial hosting and support, so you can use it without having to set it up on a system of your own. LimeSurvey's installation instructions are clear and easy, and the list of dependencies is not strenuous—MySQL or PostgreSQL, PHP 5.5 or higher, and a web server of your choice. There is a short list of PHP modules that are needed, all of which are easily installable via your package mananger.

For a company that's only been around for a couple of months, Nextcloud isn't wasting any time making improvements. Frank Karlitschek, Nextcloud's managing director, just announced the release of the Nextlcloud 10 beta.

As the workforce becomes more mobile and employers look for ways to improve productivity, collaboration software become increasingly popular. According to a June 2016 study from Markets and Markets, organizations will spend $23.39 billion on cloud-based collaboration software tools this year. By 2021, the analysts expect the market to grow to $42.57 billion, for a compound annual growth rate of 12.7 percent.

Collaboration software offer small businesses a wide variety of benefits. They can increase teamwork and communication, particularly if people on your team work in different locations. They can also help you share knowledge more widely throughout the organization and lessen the chance that employees will waste time duplicating the same work. They can also streamline your business processes and reduce the need for face-to-face meetings—both of which can decrease costs.

Cloudera, which provides a complete data management and analytics platform built on Apache Hadoop and related open source technologies, announced the beta release of Cloudera Navigator Optimizer--a tool for improved workload performance and efficiency--late last year. Essentially, the tool allowed users to modernize their analytic database or augment their data warehouse solution with Hadoop, serving up insights aimed at predictably offloading key workloads.

Now, Cloudera has announced the general availability of Cloudera Navigator Optimizer, alongside the production release of Cloudera Enterprise 5.8. Navigator Optimizer is now an entrenched part of Cloudera's platform.

Workload management is an issue for many Hadoop-focused organizations. Within any business, there can be countless workloads being run at any given time, across multiple systems, that change based on time of day and business need. Across many of these workloads, similar pain points have emerged, like breakdowns in ETL pipelines, long wait times for BI reports, increasing system pressure from ad hoc queries, and unnecessary query complexity. When adopting new systems based on Hadoop, it’s critical that customers understand their workloads, so they can address these inefficiencies and run the right workloads in the right systems for the best results.

What are the target markets for StorPool? "We target based on use-case", said StorPool CEO, Boyan Ivanov. "Companies that build public or private clouds [including] enterprises and SMEs, service providers along with IaaS/PaaS, managed service providers, telecoms and hosting companies."

The Software Freedom Conservancy has issued a blog post this week about community-oriented principles in GPL enforcement work and in particular pointing out a Linux developer who hasn't agreed to these terms and is allegedly focusing upon GPL enforcement for his own financial gain.

As part of the Conservancy's principles, "Community-oriented enforcement must never prioritize financial gain...Nevertheless, pursuing damages to the full extent allowed by copyright law is usually unnecessary, and can in some cases work against the purpose of copyleft."

Verizon Enterprise Solutions today announced its first set of virtual network services, including the usual suspects of security, WAN optimization, software-defined WANs and virtualized customer premises gear. Working with mostly established vendors, Verizon is making its services available globally on an immediate basis, and focusing heavily on giving customers lots of options for how they transition to the virtualized world. (See Verizon Launches Virtual Network Services.)

The announcement comes four days after AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) introduced its Network Functions on Demand offer, and differences between the two services are apparent and strategic, notes Nav Chander, research manager for telecom business services with IDC. (See AT&T Offers Network Functions On Demand... Sort Of.)

AT&T* and Orange have signed an agreement to collaborate on open source and standardization initiatives that will accelerate the standardization of software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) technologies. The companies are aligning on a strategic vision to move intelligence from customer hardware to the network, reducing cost and complexity. This effort will help the industry and business customers move faster towards a more agile, flexible and on-demand networking future.

The excitement that comes with a college degree is memorable – not only because of the joy of accomplishment, but because of the fear of the unknown.

In the open source community, job hunting is its own unique experience. There is great optimism and opportunity in The Linux Foundation’s 2016 Open Source Jobs Report, which found that recruiting open source talent is a top priority for IT recruiters and hiring managers. The report found 65 percent of hiring managers say open source hiring will continue to increase more than any other part of their business over the next six months.

More in Tux Machines

As it's been a few weeks since last delivering a modest Linux GPU comparison and given the continuously evolving state of the Linux kernel Git tree as well as the Mesa project that houses the RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan drivers, here are our latest benchmarks showing the current state of the AMD Radeon open-source Linux graphics driver performance relative to NVIDIA's long-standing and high-performance but proprietary driver using several different graphics cards.

AMD And CTS Labs: A Story Of Failed Stock Manipulation

We have attempted to contact Jessica Schaefer from Bevel PR, the listed PR firm on the vulnerability disclosure website, only to be greeted by a full voicemail inbox. We attempted to contact both Bevel PR and CTS Labs by email and inquire about the relationship between CTS and Viceroy, and provided them with ample time to respond. They did not respond to our inquiry.
So, let's look at Viceroy Research. According to MoneyWeb, Viceroy Research is headed by a 44-year-old British citizen and ex-social worker, John Fraser Perring, in conjunction with two 23-year-old Australian citizens, Gabriel Bernarde and Aidan Lau. I wonder which of these guys is so fast at typing. Viceroy Research was the group responsible for the uncovering of the Steinhoff accounting scandal, about which you can read more here.
After successfully taking down Steinhoff, it tried to manufacture controversy around Capitec Bank, a fast-growing South African bank. This time it didn't work out so well. The Capitec stock price dropped shortly and quickly recovered when the South African reserve bank made a statement that Capitec's business is sound. Just a week ago Viceroy attempted to do the same thing with a German company called ProSieben, also with mixed success, and in alleged breach of German securities laws, according to BaFin (similar to the SEC).
Now, it appears it is going after AMD, though it looks to be another unsuccessful attack.
Investor Takeaway
After the announcement of this news, AMD stock generally traded sideways with slight downward movement, not uncommon for AMD in general. Hopefully this article showed you that CTS's report is largely nonsense and a fabrication with perhaps a small kernel of truth hidden somewhere in the middle. If the vulnerabilities are confirmed by AMD, they are likely to be easily fixed by software patches. If you are long AMD, stay long. If you are looking for an entry point, this might be a good opportunity to use this fake news to your advantage. AMD is a company with a bright future if it continues to execute well, and we see it hitting $20 per share by the end of 2018.

The Firefox Snap package appears to be maintained by Mozilla, which allows Linux users to test drive the latest features of their Quantum browser on multiple GNU/Linux distributions that support Canonical's Snappy universal binary format.
Developed by Canonical, the Snap universal application packaging format for Linux lets Linux users enjoy the most recent release of a software product as soon as it's released upstream. It's secure by design and works natively on multiple popular Linux OSes.

today's leftovers

Unfortunately the AMDKFD GPUVM support for discrete GPUs isn't looking like it will make it for the Linux 4.17 kernel cycle.
This past week brought the AMDKFD updates for DRM-Next, a.k.a. Linux 4.17. While it has much of the discrete GPU support landing that we have long been looking forward to seeing in the mainline kernel in order to run ROCm OpenCL out-of-the-box, unfortunately, the GPUVM support wasn't part of that pull. The GPUVM support for discrete Radeon GPUs was still being discussed and not ready for pulling.

When I used Krita for the first time I already knew most of the tools, so it was easy to use. But I needed to learn more, then I watched a video that explained the basic tools and method to paint. I thought then that Krita was a good tool for painting. Today I can tell it’s a great tool for digital artists. My personal opinion: Krita is the best and I really can’t use a different program.

Very small Roundup this week, so there will be space for the CLT report and pics – thanks Marc for writing this up!
Loads of updates through; as always, you can check for yourself on Mageia Advisories, the Mageia AppDB, PkgSubmit to see the last 48 hours, and Bugzilla to see what’s currently happening.